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5 . Stories - Christiane Pelmas
139 Plays1 year ago
Christiane Pelmas is a teacher and mentor in the realms of the erotic, ecology, ethics, soul, myth, sexuality and intimacy.
Today she’s talking with me about her wild and fun transformational origin story, as well as the power of telling stories for healing, the dangers of materialism and more.
If you want to dig deeper into her work, you can find her here: https://www.christianepelmas.com/
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Transcript
Podcast Delay and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, it has been a long time. I'm not going to go into details about the cause of the delay of this podcast. Uh, it's not that interesting and I want to get on with this episode, but the headline is I was fighting with some unusually strong, but otherwise an extraordinary creative demons.
00:00:22
Speaker
Now, in the gap, some of you have clamored at me about when this next episode is coming, and I deeply appreciate that encouragement. Thank you. Hoping to stay in more of a groove going forward, but if you notice that you are missing an episode, please clamor away. In the meantime, let us rejoice for new podcast day is here.
00:00:45
Speaker
Today's episode is a conversation with my friend, Christianne Pelmas. Christianne is a teacher and mentor in the realms of the erotic, ecology, ethics, soul, myth, sexuality, and intimacy. Among many things, she's the founder of the Institute for Erotic Intelligence and the Verdant Collective. She's also a leader of community here in Colorado in a beautiful, organic, grassroots kind of way.
00:01:14
Speaker
A lot of the above, we don't actually talk that much about today. What we do talk about is Christiane's wild and fun transformational origin story, as well as the power of telling stories for healing, the dangers of materialism, and more. I had a great time in this conversation, and I wish you at least as great a time listening. Now, here is Christiane Pelmez.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, the wind has been, the last time we talked, it was the crazy snow. Yeah. And then today it's like the wind. I thought about that. It's, it's kind of unbearable, really. I'm a big enemy of the wind. Of all the weathers, I feel like the wind is just like, it just is annoying. It sucks your life out of your bones as a whole. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is so serious. The, the.
00:02:20
Speaker
From here, because you know the view I have, the mountains are actually occluded by sand in the air. Oh my god. There's actually just a dust storm. That is horrifying.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah. There were moments last night where I was driving and I could see dust in people's headlights. It was like, oh, that stuff is just like flying around. We're getting in our noses. Yes. Yeah, totally. Yeah, into our brains. Yeah, well, hopefully not. But I haven't really been outside today and I don't feel bad about it. No, this is not a day to go outside.
00:03:01
Speaker
There's like, there's one area that I definitely want to ask you about, but for some reason, I'm not going to start that. I've got it. So because what I'm going to start is with, um, what's like lighting you up or what's kind of has your attention today. So a couple of things actually, because I think I'm still, I still have your.
Science, Trauma, and Belonging
00:03:24
Speaker
the intro conversation you had to orient all of us listeners to this podcast, to get us into the terrain and this tension you set up between science and spirit. And so, well, I'll just cut right to the punchline and say that I think I believe that
00:03:51
Speaker
The singularly mechanistic scientific focus, I'm going to say this, is actually the singularly focused mechanistic scientific, which you do a really beautiful job of dramatizing in your conversation with yourself.
00:04:10
Speaker
I actually think it's a function of trauma. And I really, I mean, that's a huge, I don't know, it seems like a huge thing to say, because our culture, our society is based on, it really has built its house on this mechanistic scientific view of the world. And I actually think it's a function of an outcropping of trauma or an expression of trauma, because I see trauma as a rupture in belonging.
00:04:36
Speaker
And the mechanistic scientific view just seems like it is a it's an orphaned Experience of the world that reduces it to something that's very that imagines it a thing can be known by watching and measuring and so so actually what is really on my mind in this this today and yesterday and
00:04:59
Speaker
is the role of the witness. And because we're in Boulder, and you know, it seems appropriate, I actually tossed the word sacred in front of witness, and the role of the sacred witness. So what actually has me lit up right now is is really contemplating the ecological function of the witness. I was reading Brian swim, who's I don't know if you know him. You might really
00:05:24
Speaker
appreciate him in one way, but I'll say he's a student of Thomas Berry, so he's in that ecological, eco-zoic kind of world. And he pointed out that
00:05:40
Speaker
for billions of years, the earth existed without eyes. And it just went about it's evolving without experiencing being seen or seeing. And some 450 million years ago, which is like a drop in the bucket, eyes emerged. And all of a sudden, the world experienced itself being seen. And
00:06:03
Speaker
saw itself being seen and to me that feels like a monumental moment in the unfolding of the world and it also happens to correspond with all sorts of extraordinary diversity. I mean just extraordinary diversity in the flora and fauna. So
00:06:22
Speaker
So yeah, so this might not be where you were imagining I would go at all. But what's really turning me on now is like, what what is the it's sort of like, another version, part two of if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Is that how that goes? Something like that? Yeah, it's like, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one's there to see it, does it exist? So that's what I'm chewing on these days.
00:06:48
Speaker
I love it. I love it. No, I was not quite expecting this, but it's absolutely delightful to me. Do you know what that first organism that developed eyes, does he talk about what kind of a creature it was? Well, it would have been a water-dwelling creature. But I have no idea. It was probably one eye, not even two. I'll just start small.
00:07:14
Speaker
some fishy thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love that. There were multiple times in what you just said that I thought of Alan Watts, who's kind of just someone that, you know, was a big influence on me. I'll do both references. I'll start with the more recent one, which is like, it was from him that I got the first understanding
Consciousness and the Universe
00:07:34
Speaker
of like,
00:07:36
Speaker
The fact that we see the world and we perceive the world, let me say it another way, the fact that we are conscious demonstrates that consciousness is a part of the world.
00:07:52
Speaker
And that we are the organs of perception of the universe. Like that, you know, the universe is this, if we even imagine like, this is the kind of the story you're telling of like the universe being this organism, which is evolving over billions and billions of years, takes billions and billions of years. And it finally grows this, this organ, which can actually take it all in. Yes. Yes.
00:08:17
Speaker
And, and go, you know, and I think like those fishy things with the singular eye were the first things to like, take it in. And then we are really the first things that humanity, which I, and you know, I think there's, it's slightly contentious to single out humanity as being special case. And I, I'm curious if you want to fight me on that, we can fight. Um, but I, but to me, humanity has a unique position in the, we're the ones that, that not only perceive, but
00:08:46
Speaker
can comprehend that we are perceiving. Exactly. It's this extra level of like, we're not just having an experience, but we're experiencing ourselves having that experience. Right. And it maybe has gone a little overboard these days. Yeah, I mean, that's the yes, yes. So exactly, we have a seemingly infinite capacity to experience ourselves experiencing
00:09:15
Speaker
especially in Boulder, we like to really experience ourselves experiencing at a coffee shop. So maybe, well, it's interesting because you kind of started out just like, I'm, I'm, I want to leap to the fence of the bold areas, but also I'm like, fair enough. It's fair cop. It's interesting because you, you were talking about the witness as where I thought you were going with the witness thing was like, uh, opposing the witness with like the participant.
00:09:43
Speaker
Ah, okay. No, what I what I we could do that and I haven't done that yet. So that would be that would be exciting. What I have done is oppose the witness to the watcher. And and just started to peace out what current society has done to the witness. And, you know, really turned it into this extraordinary, we've really turned watching into
00:10:11
Speaker
The thing that is driving capitalism now So that's driving our economy is is the is catching the gaze of a person for 10 seconds or maybe even three seconds and and that we've that that if we've That you know on one end of the spectrum. There's the there's the witness or the sacred witness which in my traveling with this with this idea and making all the connections
00:10:39
Speaker
really we can take it further because Brian Swim is talking about as he talks about what it's like to what was it like for the earth to all of a sudden be seen and then to realize that certain creatures and I would say humans potentially are at the pinnacle of this certain creatures developed to be to see with
00:11:01
Speaker
multiple senses To really perceive with multiple senses so that it's an entire it's an embodied experience witnessing is an embodied experience which really makes us something like somatic stenographer or something like we could be the ones to be not just measuring the world but experiencing the world
00:11:27
Speaker
as we as we see it, you know, being shaped and impacted and and evolved ourselves simply by experience by witnessing the world and how far a cry that that is from how far a cry watching is from witnessing and just what are the constituent parts of each of those both of those activities. So that's where I went.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. I have two threads already that I, so I'm going to not including the one that I came in to talk about, but that's great. Um, so I want to just go back and, and, and catch the last one way back at the beginning of the, of when we were talking, you talked about science as being this kind of the trauma piece. Like I don't want to lose track of that. Cause I think that's really interesting. And the, and the idea of science as a, or the kind of fixation on science as a.
00:12:22
Speaker
as an expression of a loss of belonging. It's interesting because there's
Mechanistic Views and Meaning
00:12:28
Speaker
almost like a cop before the horse. I've never thought of it in that direction. Rather than thinking a consequence of the natural activity of science is that this is a kind of Nietzschean thing that we find ourselves in this valueless, cold, empty place.
00:12:46
Speaker
The way with there's no belonging in the universe but to almost reverse that a little bit and say you know this is phenomena when you are traumatized that you go and seek out. Experiences which recreate that original trauma.
00:13:04
Speaker
you know, and why that we do that is an interesting question, but like, it's pretty well established that we do do that. And so almost to look at science as like a way of recapitulating the original trauma of a loss of belonging, and then kind of deifying and then making it like God and saying, you know, which I think is also something
00:13:28
Speaker
traumatized people do yes both ends of the spectrum yeah to make sense of a to make order in what you know what becomes a very terrifying universe if we don't experience our belonging right random and terrifying
00:13:44
Speaker
It's funny because one of the responses I've had from the podcast is people saying, I experienced enchantment within science. And so there's a whole conversation about that. That's also running in my head. Right. And I, and I think that, yeah, absolutely. Enchantment within science, isn't that science used for good, right? When it opens up the doors of, of miracle rather than, you know, close them and file them away alphabetically.
00:14:12
Speaker
And for me, I do experience if I, if I am, if I get on that train, it is a hopeless worldview. Which train? The train of not of being enchanted by science, no, the train of the fixation, right? Like that kind of traumatized, like commitment. I can't remember the way you described at the beginning, but, but the fixation on, on the purely scientific
00:14:36
Speaker
Well, yeah, that mechanistic, scientific, yeah, causal. There's a great, I just got this from James Hillman and I forget the Latin, but he had some Latin. The idea of what he was talking about is viewing the world and everything in the world as self-causing. Hmm.
00:14:54
Speaker
So that rather than looking at each thing as being the consequence of a chain of cause and effects, we look at things as being self-causing. And he was kind of in the domain of psychotherapy talking about like, we want to blame our parents and say that the reason we have this neurosis is because of what happened to us in the past, but rather to experience that whatever it is as being its own entity, its own energy with its own
00:15:21
Speaker
Reason for being which is not a consequence of something else. Yes, and I wouldn't keep those two as separate and I don't remember if James I would be surprised if James Hellman really did keep those as separate Yeah, I mean that that just is the the foundation of an animist Framework that everything has its own unfolding that everything's in sold and and and therefore it has its own story and but things are co-arising
00:15:48
Speaker
things are co-emergent and each moment a different thing is going to happen depending on who is participating you know you and i could have this conversation and we can turn around and have this very conversation with somebody else and a very different thing would happen and so it feels to me very important that it's a that it's a both and that
00:16:08
Speaker
Another word for that in the, I don't know whose phrase this is, but autonomous and interdependent. Autonomous and interdependent is a big phrase now in the consent culture. That makes me think of, have you read Ken Wilber? A little.
00:16:25
Speaker
So one day I'll get through a whole podcast with that, talking about Ken. But it hasn't happened yet. But he has this idea of holons. I forget the name of your originator. He heavily leans on this idea. And the idea of a holon is each thing is a whole composed of its own parts and a part of many larger holes. And those two roles,
00:16:55
Speaker
Evoke those two dimensions right the autonomy and when i experience myself as a whole composed of my own parts i experience my autonomy when i experience myself as a member of many holes i experience my interdependence and that you the collapsing right so either one of those. Ideas of what we are is pathological that the trick is to end the developmental trick is to recognize the both end of that at increasingly.
00:17:23
Speaker
But then which is a developmental task both hand is a developmental task. So our culture doesn't do that very well. It does it up to like, you can do math, you can file your taxes, you can drive a car, whatever amount of integrating you need to be able to do to do that. And then you're on your own. Good luck. Yeah.
00:17:47
Speaker
So let me come back to the, this, yeah, this distinction between witnessing and watching. Let me start with like a provocation and then and then, and you can respond.
00:17:58
Speaker
What that reminded me of is this idea, and I heard it from Terence McKenna and he is, he says, he's quoting William Blake. I haven't been able to find William Blake saying it anywhere, but what Terence McKenna says, the William Blake says, it's an annoying sentence to say is, uh, nothing lasts.
00:18:20
Speaker
but nothing is lost. And this idea of, you know, there's this idea of the Akashic record, which I find like, I don't know the history of that too much. I don't have dove deep into it. But this idea, what I take from that idea of nothing lasts, but nothing is lost, right? Because, you know, in Buddhism, you have impermanence. And it's just like, it's just nothing lasts. Good luck to you. And it's not,
00:18:45
Speaker
And you know, and I think that, you know, people seem to get something out of that idea. For me, it's pretty dispiriting. What's the point of anything? If not, if it's just all, you know, and there's nothing, but nothing is lost piece. I think what that gave me was the sense of that somehow there is a universal memory of of experience that's being
00:19:12
Speaker
Accumulated and then I think about stories like the egg. Do you know the story the egg is Andy Weir? It's a riff on the idea that all of everybody is the same person being reborn over and over again to accumulate a bunch of experience to then become some you know, there's some Yeah, right. I'm we're gonna be birthed into a universe where this so the world is an egg and
00:19:35
Speaker
and all of this experience is us learning how to be this super cosmic being. It's a lot of fun. The story is great. I'll send it to you. And it's very short, and I've spoiled the end, but it's still just a lot of fun. Whether that's what's going on is for an egg, that's a bigger question. But just the idea that we're accumulating this experience, when we're experiencing things, it's not this ephemeral. It is ephemeral, but that it's also somehow
00:20:05
Speaker
leaving a mark in reality that's what was kind of a vote to me when you talk about this difference between the witness and the watcher where the watcher isn't like the watcher is kind of. It's a surface looking at a surface and there's no experience to lay down into the kind of depths of reality where the witness is actually taking it in in a way that lets.
00:20:30
Speaker
it accumulate. So I'll stop there. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I would I would say so many things to say about it. I would say that the watcher is is taking and the witness is participating.
Sacred Witness in Trauma
00:20:46
Speaker
And in order for that to be true, a certain amount in order to watch
00:20:52
Speaker
There's a detachment. There's an objectification that is happening. You know, when I watch Netflix, it's totally for me. I'm watching it for entertainment. There isn't a lot. There's no reciprocity. I'm just taking.
00:21:07
Speaker
And when I'm witnessing, I'm acknowledging my importance in the process. I'm acknowledging that my, that my, and this doesn't necessarily have to be a conscious thing in order to really fulfill the role of the witness, but the witness is participating in the process.
00:21:24
Speaker
And and and can I tell a short story please? Okay, because one of the ways I really this this came up the very first Reason I stumbled into this had to do with the memoir that I'm writing and really trying to understand my younger son's role in the process of of the family's Journey with his older brother my older son's heroin addiction and I could easily just write the story without him in it because
00:21:53
Speaker
He was just he was peripheral, you know, he'd come in long enough to have an experience of disappointment or, you know, fear or whatever. But but the kind of the primary character was Henry and his his process and.
00:22:08
Speaker
I realized I'd written like 100,000 words and really hadn't written Simon into the whole equation. And so I was struggling with, so what is his role? And I recalled, and I might've talked about it in our last conversation, I recalled the river trip that we took years ago when the kids were 11 and 13, and it was a river trip gone very, very wrong. And it was actually a really terrifying river trip because of a freak, a weather kind of,
00:22:36
Speaker
convergence of extreme heat and drought that had happened five days before we were on the river and the water level dropped about 12 inches. And all of a sudden this was on the Rogue River in Oregon and all of a sudden, you know, you'd think this was the first time we'd ever been on a river. So I was thinking, oh, it'll be even nicer and gentler. And in fact, it makes it more dangerous. It makes it exponentially more dangerous because rocks protrude.
00:23:03
Speaker
and water is forced through narrower passageways. And so class two rapids became class four rapids. And all of a sudden, and the Rogue River is a wilderness river. So once you put in, you can't pull out until you get to the bottom.
00:23:18
Speaker
So it's 38 miles of you have to get there and you've arranged for the pullout is in the middle of Grants Pass. It's a wilderness area. You arrange for a van to come get you. If you're not there, the van's going to go. And then you've got to wait some other, you've got to hitchhike for 40 miles over Grants Pass with your raft on your back. So, I mean, I'm sure I'm dramatizing people who run the Rogue River are like, really? No, that's not.
00:23:42
Speaker
It sounds absolutely terrifying to me. You're succeeding. Let me just ask, how long are you expecting a 38 mile? I've never done this. Yeah. It should take about four days. And we've got our sunscreen, and we brought our swimsuits, and we needed neoprene. Because the temperature dropped, it snowed on us. It rained the entire time, and when it wasn't raining, it snowed.
00:24:08
Speaker
and and we had never we'd had two rafts and two kayaks and the kayaks actually couldn't be put on the rafts because the water level was so low that we had to actually have people in the kayaks so that meant that Henry and I had to kayak most of those 38 miles and because because somebody had to you know I won't go into the details of why some of the other people couldn't so so we had this 38 mile
00:24:35
Speaker
sole initiation, just deep dive into the underworld. It was one of the most really, I think, you know, right up there at the top of underworld journeys, which for me is saying quite a lot. And Simon at 11 couldn't be in a kayak. And so he was just glued, like sometimes he was strapped in to the front of one of the rafts. And so I would be
00:24:58
Speaker
you know, kayaking and getting tumbled around and Henry would be learning how to do this and, you know, figuring rapids out and learning while we go. And there was Simon who was just just above. He was just above, but he was right in front and he saw everything. And it would be easy to say, Oh,
00:25:18
Speaker
he had it easy. And the thing that really dawned on me was that, in fact, he might have had it the hardest because he's not, you know, when you're in the rapids, your nervous system works with you to singularly focus the next task. So you're not actually taking in the gestalt of the terror.
00:25:40
Speaker
And the fact that okay, this is only mile 25 and we still have 13 more miles and now it's snowing and now it's you know, now we've got these three more rapids and and Simon was the one who was just above but still in and was
00:25:55
Speaker
you know, was the sacred witness. And the other thing that I realized about the sacred witness was in remembering, revisiting what would happen every night in our tent. You know, we'd be freezing cold, we'd get in our tent long after dark because we were paddling well into the night to try to make up for lost time, and we'd get into our wet tent with our wet sleeping bags. And we would just huddle together and just, you know, it would be a time for us to ideally sleep, but also then Simon would start to just tell the story of the day.
00:26:25
Speaker
And Henry and I would relive the story of the day in a way that our nervous systems would not have allowed us, you know, we had the story, the day was in fragments. And, you know, it kind of got stamped at the end of the day with, we survived, end of story, day, you know, let's move on. And Simon would bring us back through the whole day, and he would feel the feelings. So that was another role of the sacred witness is to actually
00:26:51
Speaker
feel, not just see with his eyes, but feel the magnitude because nobody else is feeling the fullness of what's happening and he's just up there watching it all and taking it all in and then we'd get into our tent and Henry and I would be able to stitch the day back together
00:27:12
Speaker
to be able to say oh right that happened and yeah then that happened and we could celebrate things that had happened like you shot but you you actually made it through those rapids the class five rapids you've never been on a river before let alone in a kayak and simon was the one who was really making that possible
00:27:30
Speaker
And then there were tears and there were, and so from a trauma standpoint, it's phenomenal because what we did was just unravel the first stitches of trauma before they really could take hold. But also from an underworld journey, we emerged with an intact journey thanks to the witness.
00:27:53
Speaker
thought I kept having was like of healing, right? Like that's that that storytelling is a healing kind of literally amending of your experience.
00:28:05
Speaker
Literally, yeah, literally amending. Yep, because yeah, we each just had our kind of psyche, the pockets of our psyches stuffed with various jagged edged, you know, little post-it notes. And Simon just would take them one at a time and put them in their proper place and attach the somatic experience, the sensations, attach some emotions, attach a wider range of emotions.
00:28:33
Speaker
So yeah, I started to really piece together the fact that had it not been, you know, had he been another one of the duckies, you know, another one of the kayaks, we would have had a very different experience. Like storytelling as healing.
00:28:51
Speaker
And the ways right and I I often think of storytelling as healing being about. Reframing something or giving giving someone kind of almost like putting the medicine in like with with a spoonful of sugar right like that you're that you're.
00:29:08
Speaker
hiding the thing that you that you want to communicate within a story so that it kind of bypasses the rational mind or the skeptical mind and kind of gets back into the you know which you could say the story you just told could have that effect right like you you told a story about a mode of healing and somebody listening to this might kind of digest that and i'm probably spoiling it now
00:29:33
Speaker
making it explicit but i think everybody's gonna be okay but you know that model which is interesting but what i just got from that story is a much more direct understanding of like literally telling
00:29:46
Speaker
Not some healing, helpful magical story, but literally telling the story of your life as a mode of healing. Yeah. And, and if in fact, you know, I think one of the things where I don't think we've really come through the front door here with the sacred witness with this piece of it. But one of the things we're hinting around at is that there is.
00:30:10
Speaker
There are multiple layers of things happening when a person takes themselves seriously enough, really is seated in their belonging enough to grasp their responsibility as witness, to be a witness and to really to be a participant
00:30:30
Speaker
in the unfolding or unraveling or whatever you want to call it of the world at this time. And there's also a way in which coming back to that story that
00:30:43
Speaker
We refer, so that was an underworld, in my vernacular, that was an underworld journey. We had the opportunity to meet our souls and come away knowing something about ourselves that's intrinsic and essential.
00:31:02
Speaker
and and required for the future required to fully participate in meaningful ways in the future, especially when the shit hits the fan. So years later, when Henry shows up and says, oh, I'm addicted to heroin, I need your help that having had the reflection of Simon's witness of Henry shooting five class class five rapids
00:31:30
Speaker
in a kayak, never having been on a river before, became a way to understand, to start to make sense of, and allow himself to be in the journey of his heroin addiction, which we could say is all sorts of allegory there on the Rogue River and heroin addiction. And so there's a way in which being the sacred witness
00:31:55
Speaker
really accepting the responsibility of the sacred witness and harvesting what we harvest from this experience over here actually endows us with the capacity to be more fully in the next experience. And I also heard you saying something about
00:32:15
Speaker
The sacred witness, like with the watcher, it's a kind of totally self-centered, self-serving activity. You watch Netflix and you're, you're not, you're not helping.
00:32:31
Speaker
So I kind of also want to understand that difference of like the witness as being more selfless, not only like, well, I'm witnessing in order to, you know, level up my abilities for the, for what's coming down the line, right? Not that that isn't in there, but also that there's something more transpersonal, more ecological about it. Yeah.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, so science is all about measuring, charting, graphing, measuring, making predictable what is happening in the world, making sense of what is happening in the world so we can say this is what's happening. And the witness gets to say the very same thing but from an entirely different set of tools, using an entirely different set of tools.
00:33:21
Speaker
And I do want to bring back in participant because to me, we might be able to come up with a better word, but I think one of the key distinctions is that the witness understands they are participating. And so now I can bring in another piece to this and I can bring in the program that I teach along with two other women called the Verdon Collective.
00:33:44
Speaker
And in the program, which works with women and women's erotic embodiment and erotic intelligence, and we get up to some very intimate things, we do a thing called table work. And we do a thing called table work in small pods of four participants and one instructor. And in the pod work on the tables, each woman has a chance to explore
00:34:07
Speaker
some experience of her Pleasure her embodied pleasure her arousal her which can look sexual and it can look non-sexual it can look it's entirely up to her oftentimes it does look sexual because our arousal has been so commandeered by the dominant culture that having an opportunity to reclaim it is really a powerful thing and in these pods each woman has a role and so there's always a toucher and
00:34:35
Speaker
And there's a receiver and that receiver is on the table. And then there's a raster, a woman who's just been on the table and then she gets to just rest and integrate. And there's a witness. And it's always there's there's always at least, you know, two or three women over the course of the weekend where we introduce the witness role.
00:34:55
Speaker
where, you know, there's two or three minds that are blown. And usually it's more like 12 minds that are blown where women realize, you know, at first they could say, well, what's the difference between the witness and the raster? We're all just we're just going to sit here in the room while everybody else does everything.
00:35:13
Speaker
And then very quickly, after the first round, everyone kind of scratches their heads and says, oh. And so there's a responsibility. The witness is a very active, an active participant, especially in a culture whose
00:35:31
Speaker
really primary strategy is to disappear experiences, is to disappear cultures, is to disappear experiences, is to disappear genders and sexes, is to disappear frameworks and languages to be able to
00:35:49
Speaker
Have an experience witnessed like that happened that's on the map that's in me as well as you I saw that in some ways it actually makes it real it's making me think of in the NLP training that that I did which I
00:36:10
Speaker
Adored and don't don't let the words nlp fool you if it's really a very beautiful thing they that was one of the model and i think this comes from original nlp as well is there was a similar model of but there's no rest so you would you do a session with somebody you know it's not hands on it's very different proper kind of yes.
00:36:30
Speaker
Accountants in Marin learning how to get more clients, right? But still, but you would have those three roles and, and it is really interesting that witness role. One of my experiences of having a witness is it. It's almost like there's a, there's some metaphor here as the practitioner, it gives me more consciousness to work with.
00:37:00
Speaker
That there's actually like I actually have like this somehow. I it it provides a resource for me to be able to see more experience more move more energy.
00:37:17
Speaker
Because there's this this witness there. It's almost like they're lending their consciousness to the practitioner a little bit. Yes, which we could never measure. But we've already lost our mechanistic friends. But yeah, right. Right. But and that's really the I think the the the mysterious and enchanted question here is what what what is the alchemy or what is the what is that particular
00:37:46
Speaker
biochemical thing that happens with the addition of the witness and it, and it is measurable. And I mean, so we could just to circle all the way back around to the eyes of coming onto the earth for the first time, just a few days ago, we could say that, um, it's, it, it has become an essential ecological role or an essential role in a well ecology to have
00:38:14
Speaker
the witness to have the eyes in all the ways that we see, which includes feeling and smelling and sensing. I've been preparing my next monologue, which is going to be about imagination even more so.
00:38:29
Speaker
and having to kind of reclaim the word image you know which is i'm not the first person to i'm trading kind of proud ground but just to be able to say like because people you know i'm not a very visual person like i'm much more kinesthetic i'm a kind of weird mishmash but you know people experience their interior life in a lot of different ways and when you say.
00:38:53
Speaker
an image to someone, it conjures up an image of a, of a visual image. And so to, to be able to say an image is a, is a, some multidimensional sensory object or, or, or a subject or subjectivity. Yeah. So I just, that's a total tangent just to say, I have a lot of sympathy with saying seeing in the broadest possible sense.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yes, seeing in the broadest possible sense. And the kind of bleeding edge of this project that I'm working on for me is the witnessing of the internal landscape of images.
Imagination and Internal Landscapes
00:39:27
Speaker
And saying like, there's actually so much happening that's really fun and interesting and rich and like,
00:39:37
Speaker
So specific like I had I would tell a story now. This is again such a self-indulgent tangent, but I was I was on a hike a couple days ago and I at one moment I just put my hands in the pockets of my jacket and I just had this feeling and I'm kind of strolling down the hill in the morning in the sunshine I put my hands in my pocket and there was this kind of internal image of like
00:40:01
Speaker
I felt a little bit like a hobbit. Yeah, I was just going to say that's what I saw. Right. And that's what I saw. I kind of felt like Bilbo Baggins. And then I and you know, and I also felt English, which I am. And there's something very English and the hobbits are English, right?
00:40:19
Speaker
and there's something about like a gentleman in a waistcoat enjoying his morning constitutional in the hills right with his hands in his pockets and so that's like the content which was really just kind of charming and like weather what was that but then the fact of like the specificity of that and how kind of sweet it was actually touched me like right and it's not and the content it matters
00:40:48
Speaker
not because of what it happened to be, but just because it was so specific. Yeah. And because it was evocative. Yes. Yeah, it was evocative. And yeah, I'm sure you know, Diane de Prima is one of my favorite poems ever. It's her poem, Rant. The only war is the war against imagination. All other wars are subsumed in that one. And the power of that, the power of
00:41:14
Speaker
of having a mind that is free enough to make associations that actually remind us that we're more than what we are in that given moment. I mean, you know, we could say you were reminded of your ancestry and what do we know you maybe were reminded of your
00:41:32
Speaker
more than human ancestry or however we want to classify the hobbits. We don't have any idea, but in some way, I think one of our greatest tasks now is not to be mired down in this kind of relentless monologue of information that tells us that all we can hope for and really all we should want is
00:41:57
Speaker
some version of what we can actually see and hold and touch in front of us, some version of what our neighbor already has or our favorite people we follow on Instagram already are doing. And to be able to have those moments where our mind is free enough and our psyche is free enough to make associations that remind us that so much more is happening than that feels profound.
00:42:24
Speaker
Right and like this deluge of information which is selling a reduction to the reality which is so banal that it is. Unarguable like it's just the thing that like everybody can already like yep that's what's real is the thing that we can all just point to and say that's definitely there and it's like.
00:42:46
Speaker
Well, OK, but that's just like the tip of the that's the boring tip of the edge and not that it's not incredible and beautiful in the mountains and the creatures and whatever. But like, yeah, that the thing that we can all agree is there is the surface of this vast world. Mm hmm.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact, to circle back around to belonging, I think that's actually where our belonging really, that's the food of our belonging. And, and yeah, there's a difference between going on a hike and like, oh, the trees and the sun and the trees and oh, that's a deer and oh, this is hard. And when we're going uphill, and oh, my goodness, what a day to be able to actually see the trees as, as again, in this animist viewpoint that they framework that they
00:43:31
Speaker
that they are actually doing a whole thing and we can see them and then we can imagine them. And to imagine them allows us to take into full view what they might be up to. There's the image of the tree, there's the what I can see of the tree in that three-dimensional way, and then there's the letting our minds
00:43:59
Speaker
and really imagine what else is happening, what it is that we're looking at. And that's what we belong to. I don't believe we belong to the...
00:44:09
Speaker
to the world in which we can say, there's the pine and it's the genus, blah, blah, blah, and it's related to the blah, blah, blah, and that we belong to the world in which we see the pine tree and the pine tree is its own person having an experience. And in some small way, we can actually imagine the experience.
00:44:31
Speaker
I love that and I love the word that kept kind of auto completing in my mind as you were speaking was imagine the trees as holy. Yes, exactly. Yes. The thing I want to say about that as well is like, I think this the word imagination has been distorted so badly that like, because I think you could hear someone could hear what you just said as
00:44:51
Speaker
I'm going to make up something about the trees, which is not there. And it's just like I'm going to have a fantasy. I just want to distinguish that from it's it's not that it that it's like it's imagination as perception. Yes, exactly as deep perception. Yeah. And and one of my teachers, well, I think plenty of people call distinguish imagination
00:45:19
Speaker
from deep imagination because imagination has been so distorted to be this fantastical thing that I'm just using my wild capacity to make things up versus to slow down and actually be able to perceive what I can't just readily see.
00:45:41
Speaker
but that is, but that we could say is right there in front of me. It just makes the world delightful. Oh, isn't it? I mean, it is, it allows us to, you know, it's so funny, people go to Avatar and they're like, Oh my God, if only I could live in that world, that's so amazing. The men are so wow. And the women are just in the world itself. And it's like, well, have you gone outside today?
00:46:05
Speaker
You know, do we have to be blue in order for you know, just things have to be phosphorescent in order for them to be magical I mean you could get some blue sunglasses, right? We need
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah, we'd get used to it pretty fast. It makes me think of, you know, I think I am brief tangent of, in Myers-Briggs, there's the typology and there's INFP, and kind of one of the qualities of the INFP is the INFP is idealistic in the sense that they see, they can imagine a purer, better world.
00:46:39
Speaker
And in some ways that fits me, but there's a, I think my natural turn of mind is slightly critical and I don't love that. Like I don't, like I'm kind of picky and critiquing and yeah, it's interesting and there's good things about it. But I have for a long time wanted to cultivate more appreciation, right? More of just like a sense of gratitude and appreciation because that, you know, because
00:47:05
Speaker
Mentally, I see the world is beautiful and you know and more and more in my heart as well but not every day and one of the things that Has been helpful about that is you know if I'm looking at people right like with avatar like well We could look around and you can easily find the flaws in the people in your life for the people around you and whether that's you know Aesthetically or kind of like behaviorally whatever annoying thing they do and then but if you imagine that
00:47:31
Speaker
that the alternative is just nothing at all. I feel like there's something about that that evokes suddenly more appreciation. Like, oh, if my alternative is just like a void, then suddenly, you know, even the strip mall is beautiful. I mean, it's still not.
00:47:58
Speaker
Maybe that's the difference between the strip mall and something that has some natural beauties. Maybe I'd rather avoid actually. But people definitely are.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, I'm thinking of, I mean, does modern day animism require that we see the strip mall as an installed being because I'm just a no. I mean, that's where I just say no.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah, the thing that I wanted to ask you about that we didn't get to in our previous conversation is just to know something about your origin story as like how you got this way for however you want to take that.
00:48:45
Speaker
I got this way, which, how much time do we have? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, but is there anything maybe like, is there, was there a moment or was there like a decision? Was there something that, where you, you realized that you were going to follow a path that was maybe not the
00:49:05
Speaker
The blessing and the burden of my origin story is that I wasn't given an option about whether I would blend into the dominant culture. Kids have, in my experience,
00:49:24
Speaker
our children have the task of discovering the difference between fitting in and belonging.
Belonging vs. Fitting In
00:49:31
Speaker
And God help them because it's just vicious. But that's also the task of the parents and any other elders, adults in the child's life is to really help them make that distinction and choose the sometimes arduous and quite thankless task of belonging versus fitting in.
00:49:52
Speaker
And I was never given that option because I was just so weird.
00:49:57
Speaker
So I mean really my parents just totally fucked me over because I was like a nine-year-old who could sing all of Cole Porter and you know Gershwin and some I don't even remember what kids were singing the Beegee songs and I was singing Suri with a fringe on top and and there's just no you know, you know teenage culture is just brutal so that so I was not I didn't have the option to to be part of a clique and
00:50:24
Speaker
And of course, that had a lot of pain. And now I can just look back and think, oh my God, what a blessing that was. But really, that's probably at the foundation of everything I do is just the fact that I never had the experience. My belonging was really unassailed and unassailable because that was all I had.
00:50:51
Speaker
And I very quickly had just made dear and deep and lifelong friends with the ecological world and not so much with the human world. It wasn't until I went off to college at 16 that I
00:51:09
Speaker
that I was able to actually experience friendships with human beings and so and even it was a bit rocky as you could imagine at that age, but But that yeah, so that that I always you know when I sit with clients Every day and we're really in this terrain all the time. It's such pertinent and Critical terrain at this point
00:51:36
Speaker
I have to remember that for a lot of people, they've spent their first many, many, many years being shaped into the fitting in model. And that's just quite a ruthless shape. But
00:51:53
Speaker
And then and and coming out of that fitting and model to learn how to belong is just like well in some cases it's just sort of like well how could you possibly ask that of somebody but but then you know, so I had.
00:52:07
Speaker
there was very definitely a particular series of events that I actually just found myself talking about the other night for the first time in a long time in the Kirka, we missed you in the community council Kirka, where we were invited to share an initiation story. And truly, I have so many, I'm so blessed to have so many, but the one that really felt like it was the kind of
00:52:34
Speaker
beginning of everything, the thing that really called me into
00:52:39
Speaker
into my, it called me awake, I guess, was when I was 15. And
Transformative Life Events
00:52:46
Speaker
I had gone to prep school for about a hot minute and gotten kicked out. And- I'm sorry, there's a part of my brain that has to know where is all this happening? Oh yeah, on the East Coast, I went to a prep school, which was fabulous. I actually have to say the name of it. It was Petty Prep School.
00:53:07
Speaker
Which is perfect. I mean, it was P-D-D-I-E, I mean, to be fair. But I went there because my sister was going to Princeton. My older sister was going to Princeton. And it was the only, and I was a crappy student, I was the only school I could get into, which was, it was like a prep school for kind of the children, the ne'er-do-well children of Manhattan socialites. So it was like, we were all just such misfits.
00:53:34
Speaker
And I ended up getting kicked out very, very quickly. And getting getting kicked out was a was a really marvelous story. I had actually become an exotic dancer for at a very high class bar, high class sort of now we would call it a strip joint, but it was very it was very theatrical and
00:53:55
Speaker
All the Princeton professors would go there, but one night I went out onto stage and and there was my History professor in the front row and you know, and then it didn't go so well It could have gone all sorts of ways but it didn't it ended up going the way that I ended up in the Dean's office with the history teacher sitting there and just sort of sitting on his pride, you know just sitting on smug smugly and and she gave me the Dean said well we can
00:54:20
Speaker
you can leave of your own accord and we'll put something else on your record and no one needs to know or we're going to kick you out. And so, you know, I chose the right thing. So, which was I'll leave. I'll leave and you'll write whatever you need to write that isn't, she was stripping at the age of 15, which was an amazing experience. And I, it's its own story.
00:54:47
Speaker
But, um, well, I also just want to notice that like the, the history teacher not getting in trouble for attending exactly populated with 15 year old dances. Right. Well, it was like, well, I wasn't, I was, I was, I was 18. You know, that was the, you know, that was the thing, but obviously I'm not 18. I was 15. But I, as I went out there on stage and we're in the thing that was so amazing about this, this club is that we had.
00:55:15
Speaker
we chose personas. And, you know, there was like little Debbie next door and there was the Catholic school girl and there was all those things. But then there were these archetypal personas with these extraordinary costumes to go along with it. So when I got hired, I was like, well, what the hell am I going to be? How am I going to choose this? And in and I have no idea where this came from. In to my head popped the black swan.
00:55:44
Speaker
And so this beautiful bonding moment of these women who knew that I was 15 and who said, here's the here are the rules, we're gonna out you to the manager if if you ever take your bottoms off, if you ever leave stage, if you ever do any of these things, you know, they really were mother mother'd me. And we spent a weekend together making these wings that were these full length black, just iridescent black green wings and I have the bottoms and the top to go with it and
00:56:14
Speaker
you know it was just gorgeous and so every night I would get to go make hundreds and hundreds of dollars in 1981 being the black swan on stage and so you know I had a mask so when I walked out on stage that night and I looked down and there's my weaselly little history professor I was like you know this could who knows we don't know we have no idea and it was three grueling days of just walking around campus like okay okay okay until I got called in and
00:56:43
Speaker
So yeah, so I got kicked out and went home, tail between my legs. And very shortly after that, the person who was my best friend, but I have to put quotes around that because I didn't really have friends there.
00:56:58
Speaker
She called me a few days later and said, oh, my God, I just got kicked out too. Oh, my God, it's so amazing. My parents are away for the weekend, come down and come down to my house just outside of New York City. I was in Connecticut and and we'll just have an amazing weekend. And so I went down there and the kind of main afternoon and evening was going to be this party, this small party. And we were going to you know, Coke was the big thing at that time, Coke and
00:57:24
Speaker
draining your parents liquor cabinet and and maybe smoking cigarettes and and and Instead, I mean there was probably all of that too, but instead and this just blows my mind because who knows who I've never even heard of it we did peyote and where did she get peyote and 1981 in you know and just outside of in the New York City Manhattan suburbs, but anyway there we were and And and it was a whole
00:57:54
Speaker
you know everyone else was just sort of rolling around on the carpet and doing all these sort of wow my hands and wow your face and oh my god wow and making out and and i just sat on the stairs with the family dog who was this little i don't know what it looked like a little peekaboo or whatever they are then had a whole other
00:58:14
Speaker
It was like a medicine journey, but at 15, what did I know about that? And at some point very early on, this beautiful grandmother came towards me, just sort of came through the sliding glass doors and across the shag carpet and came towards me and just reached her ancient
00:58:32
Speaker
hand out and took my hand and I had the dog tucked in my arm and we just went forever you know like out into the universe and her and she just pointed out all the
00:58:47
Speaker
all the miracles and all the ways in which this world was the most magnificent thing that had ever happened. And I'm a part of it. And your life needs to be a reflection of this. And then I got back on the Greyhound bus and I went home.
00:59:07
Speaker
And and went back into my home, my sterile home with a beautiful dad who hated his job and had no emotional expression and a mom who was a wild artist who was completely unrequited and all of the ways that a person could be unrequited in her life. And I lost my mind. Just lost my mind. It was just like this can't be these two things can't coexist this world and that world.
00:59:35
Speaker
can't coexist. And so I lost my mind. And the upshot of that is that I ended up in this beautiful, divine, divine
00:59:43
Speaker
miracle of a series of events, ended up in the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital I was born in, Manchester Community Hospital, and knew I didn't belong there. And I think I was there because I was describing this barren wasteland of a family. And my story is that this East Indian psychiatrist was like, we got to get her out of there.
01:00:09
Speaker
And so for I don't even remember how long I was there. I would have lived there for the rest of my life if you'd asked me at 15 if I wanted to do that. I fell in love. I fell in love with these crazy people.
01:00:23
Speaker
And it's the cliche all over again because I just spent time just listening to stories and I would fall asleep at the foot of the bed of a different person every night just listening to their stories. And they were the most sane, the most soulful. It's like, yeah, this is the only sane response to a world that is actually this world, the world the grandmother showed me, but has been turned into
01:00:53
Speaker
a world where people can be so damaged and brutalized and misunderstood and forgotten about. That sort of one, two, three experience of going from being this archetypal stripper
01:01:08
Speaker
for a bunch of Princeton professors to taking a tour of the benevolent and magnificent universe with the grandmother to being in the, I mean, I feel like I was reborn in that hospital. My proper birth happened then and there.
01:01:25
Speaker
It's so interesting because so many people I know someone I would slightly presumptuous calling friend he's a sweet man but we you know we took one class together for a few weeks he told a story in this class about having a.
01:01:41
Speaker
Mental breakdown at the age of 17 and asking to be committed like he actually asked his parents he said I think I need to go to a hospital because I don't feel well you know and they and they took him to you know this is in California and they took him to some hospital in Berkeley.
01:01:59
Speaker
And as soon as the gates closed behind him and let the, you know, the, the door locked, he suddenly realized this is the worst possible idea of my life and had a really horrible time for however long he was there until he could get out. And I feel like that's the story of psychiatric hospitals in this country that I, you know, and in the West that I hear over and over again is the, is this, that they are not good places for, for healing and wellness. So it's just striking to me that you had this different experience.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know that they were actually good places for healing and what, you know, to, I don't know that any of the people who really needed to be there benefited from being there. And, and, and maybe we could say,
01:02:42
Speaker
there was not as bad as where they came from. There was not as bad as where they, given all the options, this was the best option. For me, I would sit in the window in the main room and look out at the parking lot and look at the people coming and going and say, oh my God, I'm so grateful the door is locked. So those crazy people out there cannot get in here.
01:03:09
Speaker
And and so but I knew I didn't belong there. I mean it wasn't it was also a heartbreaking story It was such a it was a love story that ended in heartbreak because I knew I didn't belong there. I wasn't I wasn't damaged like that and I was the only person who wasn't on any meds I you know, I was I was it was more like I was an undercover journalist, you know, it was
01:03:32
Speaker
So you were seeing a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist said, let's just get you in here. I came home, got off the Greyhound bus after being in New York with my friend.
01:03:49
Speaker
And came home and like three hours later within three hours after being in that just sterile anaerobic environment, I just crawled under my desk and I made a little fort for myself, put a blanket over the desk and just. And you're still kind of coming down off of peyote. Oh, I'm sure. And I mean, I'm sure I did coke and I'm sure, you know, like I would suggest way too many things in my system.
01:04:13
Speaker
But I'd had this numinous, mind-blowing experience. And so I just crawled under my desk and started to cry and didn't stop crying for four days until my father, this giant first-generation Swedish Estonian man, just came in not knowing what the hell to do with me and just scooped me up in his arms and brought me to the hospital, to the emergency room.
01:04:37
Speaker
There I was interviewed by a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist, I've wanted to go back and get my records and I haven't done that yet, but the psychiatrist asked me a very interesting question. He said, have you ever thought about being dead?
01:04:51
Speaker
not have you thought about suicide. But you know, if you ask a teenager, even a happy teenager, like a well adjusted, fitting in teenager who's captain of the soccer team, if you say have you ever thought about being dead, if they're honest with you, they're gonna say, absolutely, you know, we're like existential times five at that age.
01:05:11
Speaker
So so, you know, I probably answered yes and at that point that was really you know, you just needed to prove that somebody was Unreliable in terms of suicidal ideation and and that's why I think that you know after interviewing me and finding out the whole arc of what had just happened He was just like we need to she can't be in her house her house actually her home is not the place for her and we'll figure out where else to send her but her home can't happen and
01:05:40
Speaker
So that's my story. Who knows what actually happened and what this psychiatrist thought. But I was absolutely not suicidal. I was almost the opposite of suicidal. That question makes me think of Ramana Maharshi.
01:05:56
Speaker
That's what happened to him at the age of eleven is he thought he thought about being dead, but he thought about being dead and he had this transformative experience that revealed him as this great sage. So I just thought about that. It's probably a valuable thing to think about.
01:06:19
Speaker
This whole story is making me think of my grandfather who was a psychiatric nurse in South Wales That was his profession. He worked at a mental institution and I and you know This is it's a joke that he would tell
01:06:33
Speaker
that i also that i i'm gonna tell it but i you know it i i don't say this entirely lightly that he said so many people told me that jesus today one of them must be right which
01:06:49
Speaker
I don't know. There's something about that. My mom had a friend who's a brother. He was Moroccan and this is in the UK. He was an English citizen, a UK citizen. He lived in the UK and he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In the UK, he was treated as mentally ill and he was medicated and he had a doctor and he had to
01:07:17
Speaker
and in Morocco he was treated as a sage and people related to him as a holy man who had insight and he had this weird double life where he would go back and forth between the UK and this completely pathologizing view of what was going on and then Morocco where there was this kind of elevated view and I don't know, I imagine that there was some wisdom in the way that the UK were treating him
01:07:47
Speaker
that it wasn't just kind of completely an arbitrary, cruel dismissal that there's some, but it's also, I don't know. I mean, I don't know the facts of it enough to say that. I think that's just my habit of mind is to imagine that there's some, there are good reasons for the things that people do, but yeah, I just think that that's also just like, what a wild experience of life to have these two completely different reflections of who you are. Right. I mean, and for somebody who's,
01:08:16
Speaker
experiencing what we're calling schizophrenia, I could imagine that that could that could be actually quite either very validating and very organizing to have these two to have externally two very different
01:08:33
Speaker
ways the world is dealing with you if that's your internal reality that you have multiple versions of reality happening at the same time and you never know which one you're going to be in to have the it could either just really mess you up or or somehow paradoxically like homeopathically maybe Makes sense It's that's so interesting. Yeah, like it like like that. The world is holding some of the burden of that experience. Yeah
01:09:02
Speaker
So were you at the end of the transformation story? I know you asked me you asked me what if I could I missed some version of if I was there one moment or you know some some time in my life that really seemed to to set the stage for everything that I've done since then and and and that yeah that that is very much I think the the series of moments that I think of when I think of my my really primary initiatory experience
01:09:33
Speaker
one thing it reminded me of as well, there's I want to I will recommend this to you with no hope that you will read it because it's a series of comic books called The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Oh,
Cultural References in Transformation
01:09:47
Speaker
you know Neil Gaiman? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He did. He wrote a book of Norse mythologies. Yeah. So his early work is this long run on this comic book called The Sandman. He kind of created it and did, you know,
01:09:53
Speaker
Well, thanks for sharing that.
01:10:02
Speaker
many many years on it and I think it's his masterpiece it's absolutely one of the most beautiful things yeah and they just televised it and it was the tv show was fine but but the the comic book you know but it's it's one of those things that's you know very beautiful and it's really interesting it's about um
01:10:22
Speaker
It's about these kind of pre-God-like figures called the Endless. And so the main character is the avatar of dreams. And so there's dreams and there's death and there's destiny. They all begin with D, there's desire, despair.
01:10:38
Speaker
It's a comic book, so there's these weird gimmicks. But it somehow has this deep resonance. It's very interesting. The main character is the King of Dreams and lives in this world of dreams. He deals with all of these archetypal forces. There's a storyline in there where this Babylonian goddess Ishtar
01:11:03
Speaker
is an exotic dancer in a strip club, just in like a cheap dive bar strip club, right? And that's where she is. And she's just dancing like whatever normal dancing. And then there's a plot moment, which means she has to dance this like sacred dance that elevates everybody in the strip club into this kind of profound,
01:11:28
Speaker
you know uh like sacred state and so anyway i thought of that when you were talking about these archetypal figures that in the strip club of like how fun is that how much more fun than like the catholic school girl or something oh my gosh it's so so much yeah so much for more fun yeah and then to go back to petty and and
01:11:48
Speaker
sit along and I think I was like co-captain of the varsity tennis team and we just crushed it that year and I was there long enough to get the gold before I got sacked. So yeah, the both end of the this wild world that we live in.
01:12:07
Speaker
Well, I think that's a really, yeah, I think that we covered a lot of ground here. Is there anything burning in you that hasn't been said? No, what I'm sitting with now is having had the conversation around the sacred witness and doubling and then finishing it up with
01:12:30
Speaker
Telling the story telling my a bit of my story has me realizing that That in in so many ways At that time in my life. I was really apprenticing to that to that witness that sacred witness role just being in the kind of on the front lines of things on the front lines at the
01:12:53
Speaker
at the exotic, why I can't even remember what they would they called it in those days the exotic bar. And then also at the in the locked mental health unit psychiatric unit, just being this person who didn't really belong there wasn't really supposed to be there, but was there and knew that my time was limited.
01:13:14
Speaker
And just was gathering all the stories, just gathering all the stories and in some way really watching the process, watching and listening and being and feeling in so many ways that just wouldn't, nobody else was doing that, that I know of. Nobody else was doing that. This theme of belonging and that there were places that you didn't belong. Yeah.
01:13:41
Speaker
Like you were kind of finding yourself in these places you didn't belong. Yeah. And in some ways felt so much of my belonging, but I didn't, maybe it is that I didn't, yeah, I wasn't meant to stay there. I wasn't meant to stay there. Well, thank you so much for taking some extra time with me today. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Robbie. It's just wonderful. It's been wonderful.
01:14:16
Speaker
you